A prediction

It's time to throw my hat in the ring predicting the 2012 election results. So here it is: Barack Obama will be defeated. Seriously and convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the forces of reaction, spending, rejecting God, economy, no jobs, terrorism, not even due to his constant misleading the public, one that has been complexly overlooked. Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake.

I'm using the term in its generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a screw-up, but someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a fool with energy. A fool is a terrible thing to have around, but a fool with energy is a nightmare.

Barack Obama is a flake, and American people, as well as the world, are beginning to see it. The chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are impossible to either understand or explain. These are not the errors of the person who can't grasp the essentials of a situation, or the neurotic who ruins things out of compulsion, or the man suffering chronic bad luck without his teleprompter. As we witnessed in the debates with Mitt Romney.

The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right angles to the ordinary world. It's as if he's the product of a totally different evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are slightly but distinctly at variance to ours.

Obama's rise has been widely portrayed as a kind of millennial Horatio Alger story -- young lad from a new state on the outskirts of the American polity, a member of once-despised minority, works his way by slow degrees to within the presidency itself. That's all well and good -- we need national myths of exactly that type.

Obama spent too little time in any of his positions to make an impact one way or another. This is what saved him from the normal fate of the flake: he was never around long enough for his errors and strange behavior to catch up with him. Now it has!

Here we have a campaign with everything going for it -- the media is in the candidate's pocket, the candidate himself being worshiped as nothing less than the new messiah. And yet the results have comprised little more than one fumble after another, one lie after another.

In the fullness of time, we will inevitably see such a figure in the White House. But not this year, and not this candidate. Such acts of a national flake occur only when there's no real alternative. In this election, an alternative exists. Whatever his shortcomings maybe, nobody ever called Mitt Romney a flake.